Picking up the Covid pieces

On Wednesday, while South Australia plunged into a six-day lockdown and Victoria recorded its 19th straight day with no new cases of coronavirus, the alarming human cost of Victoria’s four-month lockdown, one of the toughest in the world, continued to emerge. While harder to quantify than the economic fallout, the hidden toll, especially among young people, is grim. Doctors are identifying a new wave of mental health problems among young people, Victorian editor Damon Johnston reports. On Monday, Rebecca Urban revealed that thousands of Victorian students had stopped attending class or completing schoolwork by remote learning by the end of the state’s extended lockdown, sparking fears many could drop out of education for good. Some schools are trying to track more than 50 students.

From August to October, Johnston reports, 16 teenagers who had self-harmed were rushed to the Monash Children Hospital’s intensive care unit in critical conditions. The number was a significant increase on five self-harm cases treated at the hospital in the corresponding period last year. The mental health and educational problems being identified are complex and will take many months, if not longer, to address. The waiting list for the Andrews government’s Navigator program, for example, which supports students who are at risk of not completing schooling, has blown out to six months. With the end of the school year fast approaching, many schools are struggling to contact dozens of students who dropped off the radar as remote learning stretched across most of term two and all of term three — more than 20 weeks — for 160,000 students in years 8 to 10. That age group has paid a high price for the lockdown, considering few were likely to contract serious doses of the virus.

Suburban general practitioners also are finding adult patients struggling with anxiety, exhaustion and feelings of being unable to cope after months of being disengaged from family and friends. Worries about exposing children to the virus now that the lockdown is over remain a problem for some parents, as is helping younger children readjust to leaving and then returning to daycare. For many families, life will not return to normal until workers are encouraged to return to their workplaces from home.

Given the widespread harm done, Premier Daniel Andrews has pledged a major investment in mental health in next week’s budget. Almost $870m will be spent, including $492m for 120 new mental health beds in Melbourne, outer metropolitan centres and Geelong. What is also important, as doctors, paediatricians and adolescent mental health experts emphasised to The Australian, is that similar draconian lockdowns be avoided in the event of a third coronavirus wave in Victoria. Other jurisdictions need to take note of the Victorian experience with a long-term stringent lockdown and avoid it.

The danger from Victoria’s second wave of COVID-19 has passed, but the nightmare is continuing for many. The hidden mental health and educational toll of the Andrews government’s lockdown underlines the importance of other responses to outbreaks, especially widespread testing, the provision of rapid results and efficient contact tracing. The Marshall government has launched a short, sharp lockdown to break the back of a fast-replicating virus cluster in South Australia. But it must do better than making people queue for hours to be tested.